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The Patron Saint of Suburban Foxes

. . . Her own orange, though, deepens / in shadow to red, like condensed autumn, and makes her almost invisible / against the brick she edges past / on her burnt-matchstick legs

Sunbeams

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Glass Overfull

William Rees on Humanity’s Ecological Overshoot

There has been a boom, and soon there will be a bust, in global human population. And no advanced civilization will be able to reemerge because we will have used everything up. There will be no oil and gas and other supplies of that nature to maintain any civilization that might emerge from the ashes of this one.

Wild Animals

Swimming with whale sharks, hearing a mountain lion, refusing to eat a snake

Considerable Luck

In the weeks before my surgery I wandered parks and refuges where black-crowned night herons clung to cattails, pied-billed grebes fished ponds, and raucous crows cawed and flew upwind to find branches where they could shelter together. They would aim for a tree, fail to settle as a flock, then fall back and regroup to try again. Like the crows, I wouldn’t quit.

Selected Poems

I know now, / having woken / and climbed away from you / in the chill / that I can do it. / Cast a spell / on my body.

Selected Poems

A mourning dove calls: Why / do you grieve? This world, / I answer.

Our Star

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as time. Then bang!—the first particles, cooling into the first atoms, clumping into the first nebular clouds, collapsing into the first stars, shining out the first light, unspooling over billions of years to make it all happen: the joy, the love, the pain, everything. Don’t ask how. Nobody knows. But here we go.

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.